


so is somebody gonna name this kid or what

by endeofblood



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Domestic Fluff, Earth C (Homestuck), Multi, it's still fluff i promise, mention of canon typical infanticide, that sounds horrible out of context, they've got a kid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-30 01:25:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15085979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endeofblood/pseuds/endeofblood
Summary: Everybody has opinions on how this grub should be raised and all of those opinions suck but at least they all love each other: the ficRequest 1 by sallowsunflowersOk, so I really love Earth C everyone lives AUs (haha, ha, oh dear I just want them to be happy). I really like this polyship as a giant pale mess, with some quadrant smearing (between whoever you're comfortable with, I'm down for anything). I'd really like something showing what they get up to [...] Maybe they adopt grubs?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sallowsunflowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallowsunflowers/gifts).



“Quite frankly, I hadn’t realized casual infanticide was a direct feature of your previous career path rather than just an inevitable result. Or are you just looking to expand your portfolio?”   
  
“Har fuckin’ har, Lalonde, five thousand years a’ time travel ain’t helpin’ your standup routine much.”  
  
“Hm… rats. Well, I suppose I’ll ask Dave to dip me back to drink deeply from the temporal stream once more, and once you’re quite finished reducing a grub I’ve fostered since hatching into a delightfully cotton candy smear, maybe, if the gods are kind, I might just be able to do some whacky observational comedy about it a la future Troll Jerry Seinfeld.”  
  
From outside, Feferi’s fins flick. Rose’s voice becomes sharper and more indistinct in turn as she audibly mills about the room—there’s the sound of flats on tile, the sound of a running faucet, some distant crinkling of paper.  
  
It was the first time she and Eridan had properly visited the Carapacian Kingdom—things in their own domain had kept them busy enough, most days. But Kanaya and Rose called, and they came. They’d gotten to spend a few hours wandering the decorated streets, beneath the broad, colorful sheets of canvas and ribbon-shreds that the carapacians are so fond of—it reminded her of Derse, in a funny way.   
  
“ _Deeps_ , you humans think you know everythin’. You think I’m doin’ this because it’s how I get my jollies?”  
  
“What I do understand is that we are all wading into very deep and uncharted waters. For five thousand years, none of us walked this infant planet. And for five thousand years, there was never another tyrian. You, just like all the rest of us, have no goddamn idea how or why one hatched now. What you need to understand is that I’m not about to let you exercise your darkest fears about your own species by leaving a child under my custody to die. If you aren’t interested in taking her, then fine. I only called you because I thought Feferi might know better than all the rest of us what’s the best course of action to take, instead of blindly stumbling ever-onwards, chasing the tail of dread, confusion and, of course, dead kids.”  
  
“I ain’t just gonna—I’m not goin’ to let her do that to herself. That’s what you don’t understand, that’s what none a’ you fuckin’ understand. Bein’ the penultimate ain’t just somethin’ I claim to for the sake a’ the title an’ paddin’ my resume, it’s a relationship humans don’t have anythin’ analogous for, so in the words a’ troll Epicurus I’m goin’ to need you to step off.”   
  
Eridan had asked for ten minutes alone with Rose, just ten. Feferi indulges him for exactly eight minutes and forty-three seconds.  
  
“Are you kidding me?”  
  
Eridan and Rose snap to look at her; Feferi finds some fleeting satisfaction in their surprise. Rose is fussing over something in a medium sized plastic container—Eridan is standing several paces behind her, leaning backwards against a countertop but visibly bristling. His fins are flared in a way Feferi recognizes to be irritation—and maybe a hint of fear. Neither of which seemed to be directed at her.  
  
“Fef—”  
  
“ _Don’t_ Fef me right now. Cut the carp—the crap—cut the shit, Eridan! Do you even hear yourself?”  
  
“Well,” Eridan says in that very special souring tone of his, pushing himself off the counter, “I’m sure you an' the popular record won’t be surprised to hear my noise hole’s closer to my ears than my pan.”  
  
Feferi doesn’t deign to reply, frustratedly fidgeting with the ends of her hair, twirling it in tight loops between fingers decorated in three distinctly colored quad rings. “Don’t I get a say in this, or do you think you’ve already decided what’s best for me?” It has an edge; she meant it that way.   
  
That seems to strike a defensive cord: Feferi can see it run down the line of his jaw like a taut string being plucked, something silently reverberating between orphaner and heiress. Rose, either oblivious to the silent power dynamic between the two trolls or pointedly ignoring it, turns her attention back to the container balanced on the edge of the sink. Feferi vaguely registers the way she tips the contents of a brightly-colored cylinder into it.  
  
“A’course you do, Fef—eri.” The second half of her name is clumsily pieced together against the first, and Feferi would feel guilty under different circumstances. Then, he continues: “I just don’t want you makin’ this decision with your collapsin’ an’ expandin’ bladder based aquatic vascular system instead a’ the real estate between your ears.”   
  
Annnnd he’s ruined it again. Feferi can feel her urge to apologetically pap this dumb buoy dry up like seaweed at low tide.  
  
“This isn’t just your decision, Eridan,” she repeats, leveling him with a look that was thoroughly unimpressed. “At the bare minimum, Aradia and Sollux get a vote, too. We’ll take her back to the Troll Kingdom like we promised! And then we can work from there.”  
  
“But—”  
  
“I’m not going to get overthrown and murdered by a tadpole even if she has cool blood and sweet tricks! Have a little faith!” Feferi’s fins flick again and she takes position alongside Rose, who’s still carefully adding salt in small increments to the water of the grub’s temporary holding container.  
  
Feferi takes a look inside.  
  
It looks like she must have, as a child. Right? Granted, she’d never seen another tyrian before, her own ancestor excluded. But it’s an approximation to what she’d imagined: it’s got horns that are short and slightly curved, almost like hers, but not quite—and its body is segmented, like the other grubs she’d seen in Rose and Kanaya’s care (like most trolls, she’d never seen a grub on Alternia—she wasn’t a jadeblood, after all). It looks up at her with bright eyes in a hue she recognizes, and immediately disappears against the backdrop of the container.  
  
“Oh,” Rose muses.  
  
“Oh,” Feferi echoes.  
  
“She’s got a sort of camouflaging mechanism that we’ve seen in a number of the other seadweller grubs, you, ah, might have triggered some kind of instinctive response.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“Given that, on Alternia…”  
  
“Right.”  
  
Feferi lets the final word stay suspended in the air. Her eyes don’t stray far from the container—neither to Rose on her left, or to Eridan, who has soundlessly joined her on her right.  
  
She quietly resolves that she and her clade will do right by this small, fragile thing. This isn’t Alternia.  
  
This is something better.


	2. Chapter 2

Aradia Megido isn’t particularly worried.  
  
Oh, it isn’t as though she doesn’t know the risks. She wasn’t hatched with the luxury of naiveite and she never learned it along the way, either. When two of her quadrants—bless Feferi and Eridan’s hearts, really!—brought the tyrian grub back to the Troll Kingdom, Aradia knew as well as either of them exactly what they were inviting into their hive. Though she’s a rustblood, as far removed as possible from the fickle drama and grandiose gesturing of the (formerly) upper castes, she knows enough of the stories by virtue of having seadweller quads.   
Tyrians are unpredictable. Half feral by nature, it’s been said! It could also be said they got lucky with Feferi; such luck could hardly be replicated.   
  
But Aradia Megido isn’t particularly worried.  
  
What she is, however, is horribly, gut wrenchingly, insatiably _curious_. In fact, she imagines this whole thing is going to be pretty… well. For lack of a better word, pretty fun.   
She and Sollux had been in accord that Feferi deserved some distance for a while. Once Aradia decided that distance had been appropriately administered, however, she wanted to go say hi. Sure, everybody had done some preliminary introductions with the grub (which looked like some kind of aquatic bug in her humble estimation) but she’d only caught glimpses and peeks. She’s planning on rectifying the situation with an offering of sashimi.  
  
Feferi’s locked herself up in her study—Aradia’s no expert on child care, but that seems pretty odd!—and Aradia raps on the door with her knuckles.  
  
No response.  
  
Aradia rolls her eyes.  
  
“I’ve got lunch!”  
  
No response.  
  
“…Fishlivery for one Feferi Peixes?”  
  
There’s another long moment of meaningless silence, and just as Aradia’s about to bring her knuckles back down against the frame, the door opens a sliver. “That,” Feferi says, in a voice that sounds much more tired than Aradia expected, “was really bad.”  
  
“Or maybe it was really good but you’ve gone too long without your tuna fix and now you’re spiraling into some kind of iron-deficient anemic haze, and your girlfriend is here to rescue you.”

“No, I think it was probably just really bad.” Feferi opens the door wide enough to grant Aradia passage.  
  
Her study actually looks… tidier, than Aradia had remembered? Feferi had taken on quite a bit of the administrative workload of the Troll Kingdom, alongside Dave, Jade, Karkat, Terezi, and, often, Eridan. Feferi’s personal style of choice trended towards ‘organized chaos’—something that drove Sollux absolutely insane, but Feferi swore up and down that she could find what she needed with her eyes closed. _Trust the prawncess!_  
  
(Granted, Aradia’s room wasn’t much better, but she isn’t used to owning this sheer volume of _stuff_ so she has an _excuse_.)  
  
Back to Feferi’s study, though—the pod-like shelves have been neatened up, the glass-surface desk sports nary a single cuttlefish drawing, and the grub (still in its little transport container) is balanced on a chair in front of a board. The board itself is covered in papers and little schematics, and—  
  
And—  
  
“Feferi, what is all this crap?”  
  
Feferi flushes embarrassed, her fins smoothing out against either side of her head and then flaring defensively. “Schoolfeeding!”  
  
“These are spreadsheets. No, worse, these are _quarterly expense reports_.”   
  
“Advanced schoolfeeding.”  
  
“You are not turning our grub into a bureaucrat!”  
  
“She needs to know how to run a kingdom.”   
  
“Tell me, is she even _literate_?”  
  
“Jade told me human mothers sometimes play human Mozart before the baby hatches, this is like that! Kind of.”  
  
Aradia casts an incredulous look towards the grub in question, almost conspiratorially, but the grub is not able to return the exasperation. She blows a little air bubble in her tank.  
  
“Besides,” Feferi continues, taking her quadmate’s silence as a sign that she was winning her over, “I wasn’t much older than she is when I knew how to balance a budget.”  
  
“That… sounds really fake, but okay.”  
  
Feferi looks, in a word, stressed. Her eyes are roving: over Aradia, past her, through her—and she’s doing that little fidgety thing with her hands that Aradia strongly suspects she picked up from Sollux.  
  
…Aradia Megido would like to amend her earlier statement.  
  
Aradia Megido is maybe a little bit worried.  
  
She puts the plate of sashimi down on the desk, takes Feferi’s head between her hands (her curls, as always, are soft between her fingers), and plants a kiss on her quadmate’s forehead.   
  
“You don’t have to be perfect all the time,” Aradia says, firmly, “and neither does this grub.”  
  
That seems to deflate something in the would-be princess, and she slumps a little against the warmer troll. There is a notable lack of objection, which Aradia takes to be a small victory.  
  
“I’m going to take her for a little bit, okay?”  
  
Feferi nods, resting her chin on her girlfriend’s shoulder.  
  
“First, though, we’re going to feed her little bits of raw seafood to see if it does that freaky shark thing that you do when you’re hungry.”  
  
“ _Hey_!”  



	3. Chapter 3

Unlike Aradia, Sollux Captor has taken the whole idea of “giving Feferi distance” to heart. 

When Feferi and Eridan returned from the Carapacian Kingdom, he and Aradia had both expected them to have a grub in tow. What he personally did not expect, however, was said aforementioned grub to look like a Go-Gurt on the evolutionary fast track to becoming an ambulatory kraken (based on Aradia’s description and Eridan’s colorful vocabulary, at least).   
But like, in kind of an adorable way? (That one was a concession from Feferi)

Eridan had been pissed—apparently, he hadn’t expected a tyrian grub either—but the four quadmates had put it to a vote. Feferi, a resounding yes, was soon joined by Aradia (this is a maj0r life decisi0n, n0t an amateur s0ci0l0gical experiment, AA.), leaving Eridan, a resounding no, with Sollux left to either do something decisive or bring them into a stalemate. Feferi and Aradia ultimately won out, but Sollux lacked Feferi’s stubborn yet dutiful optimism, Eridan’s charming store-brand nihilism, and Aradia’s incorrigible curiosity. 

The four of them have the immortality of fledgling gods who survived the game; Sollux just wants to put his head down and wait for the storm to pass. He’s more defensive of this life that the four of them have carved out together than he’d ever expected to be.

Eridan, to his credit, had accepted the vote with only the smallest of tantrums. He’d gone out to blow off some steam with Jade at the firing range—though that was some hours ago. In the meantime, Feferi had taken off with the grub for some Troll Hooked on Phonics or whatever, and Sollux and Aradia had decided to give her space. Mostly in the form of hunkering down to play some psionic checkers. (It's a lot like regular checkers except both players can make the pieces explode with their minds, which means it’s also better than regular checkers.) When Aradia had eventually gone to go check in on Feferi, though, that left him alone. 

He doesn’t mind alone much, alone is fine, alone is comfortable; ever since the game, though, it’s the silence he’s getting used to. Silence is a luxury he hadn’t tasted until he’d lost the voices. But it’s also like cake to a man who’d never heard of sugar: when it was new, he gorged himself on it until he made himself sick. Now he takes it in small doses, but it was too rich to do much more than that. When it inevitably makes him uneasy he finds himself tapping dulled claws against random surfaces and humming nonsense jingles. 

…

Which gets old pretty fast.

…

Gods, okay, fuck this.

Sollux pulls himself up from the crosslegged position he’d been settled in since Aradia left, unfolding the collapsible cane at his side. He hasn’t yet mastered Terezi’s smellovision—TZ’s a fine teacher, but she’s not a psychic dragon, either—so it’s a workable alternative. Sollux had taken the whole idea of giving Feferi distance to heart until he got bored, okay, so sue him. (Or, maybe, alone isn’t quite as comfortable when you have people you actually want to be around.) So he sets off to find Feferi, Aradia, the grub, or some combination of the three. 

The castle of the Troll Kingdom is vast: it’s real estate they share with Dave, Jade, Karkat, and Terezi, but they never end up bumping elbows more than they intend to. For a newly blind man, it’s a little daunting, but he’s started learning the layout. After he leaves the living space he shares exclusively with his three quads, he picks a direction and starts walking.   
He gets about twenty paces down the carpeted hallway until he hears Aradia’s laugh bubble out from behind a door. It’s a familiar sound that tugs, momentarily, at the corner of his lips. 

“AA?”

He pokes his head into the room. He knows they’re in Jade’s lab (half a cybernetic workshop, half a terrarium—Jade’s just kind of like that) based on the placement, and the overpowering scent of honeysuckle and axle grease; this isn’t unusual, Aradia has been drawn to its irrepressible feeling of life since they moved in. Jade apparently doesn’t mind the intrusion as long as she isn’t in the middle of something important. 

“Sollux!”

He can hear the smile in her voice, and a faint sploosh. The smile is welcomed… the sploosh is deeply, deeply suspicious. 

“Did you take her out of the container?” Based on the brief schoolfeeding crash course he’s gotten so far, as far as he knows, seadweller grubs can toddle around out of water for at least a few hours. That isn’t the concerning part.

“Just for a little bit.” 

“O-kay. Now, real fast, I’m going to go ahead and ask why, but if you were doing a communing ritual to test the wriggler’s untapped horrorterror heiress potential, I’m going to need you to come up with something better to bullshit so I don’t go grey before I have time to grow the cheekbones to carry the foxy ancestor aesthetic. Try feeding me a line about a baby calisthenics class or something.”

“The elder gods are so last millennia, Sollux, don’t be silly.”

“That’s… I want you to know that isn’t as reassuring as you were maybe thinking it would be.”

“I wasn’t doing any sort of quote-unquote summoning ritual, or a baby calisthenics class! Nothing that interesting on either count. I’m just wrigglersitting her so Feferi can get some rest, nothing more nefarious than that.”

“Oh.” Sollux considers that for a moment. “Do you need any, uh, help or anything?”

“Well, she’s just eaten, so I was bouncing her for a little bit before I put her down for a nap or something?”

“You were bouncing her.”

“Yes!”

“…AA, were psionics involved?”

“Were psionics not supposed to be involved?”

Sollux tents his fingers in front of his face and exhales deeply.

“Just give me the fucking wriggler.”


	4. Chapter 4

By the time Eridan Ampora returns to the castle, the sun has crested past its highest point of ascent and is starting to threaten towards the horizon—late afternoon, he’s reasonably sure, though he’s still adjusting to living diurnally. The soreness in the muscles that wrap around his upper body sing of the tension he tried to claw out of his shoulders with the butt of a rifle; he and the human Jade have found common ground in target practice, at least mostly smoothing over the awkwardness of their first few conversations.

After a few hours at the range, Jade Harley had told him, in so many words, that he was being an avoidant baby and needed to get his shit together. 

So back to the castle it was.

He slips in uneventfully enough. Maybe too uneventfully, even. He combs his bangs with his fingers and the foyer with his restless gaze, not seeing hair or hide of any of his quadmates. He gives the adjacent hall, leading to their wing of the castle, a cursory search. It almost brings him to Feferi’s study, but his stride only slows and does not stop as it crosses in front of the familiar door.   
He wants to… apologize? Yeah, of course he wants to apologize—he hadn’t meant to tread on any toes, or offend Feferi, or nothing. He hadn’t expected her to take it like that, though… getting offended, and all that. It wasn’t like his concerns weren’t reasonable (considering the fact tyrians are hatched to be in constant contention, in an evolutionary chain of usurpers) and it wasn’t like he was that out of line when he brought up the fact that there were things Rose just doesn’t get about—

Okay, so maybe he needs to work on this whole apologizing thing.

He’s lost in his own head long enough that he barely notices when he’s reached the common area of the cluster of respiteblocks he shares with his clade. There’s a checkerboard set up on the floor, and several pieces of checker-shaped debris, as well as at least one red piece firmly lodged in the opposite wall. Ah, must have been psionic checkers, then.  
So there’s evidence of quads (fuckin’ pain in the ass fuckin’ psychic powers), but an alarmingly persistent lack of quads themselves. He rubs his face with one hand, sliding his rifle off his back and hanging it up near his own respiteblock. Then, the sound of running water nearby has his fins perking. He inclines his head towards the absolutionblock—the sound of shifting… sand? Has him rapping his knuckles against the doorframe.

“You okay in there?”

“Absolutely peachy.” With a voice dry enough to absorb all the humidity in the entire castle, Eridan immediately pegs that as his part-time-kismesis-part-time-moirail, and rolls his eyes on reflex.

“The fuck are you doin’, Sol?”

“Starting a zen garden.”

Eridan tests the doorknob and is surprised when it’s unlocked. Inside, Sollux is sitting on a wooden stool next to a filled bathtub, pouring small amounts of salt into the palm of his hand and then in turn dumping the salt into the water. One of his wrists is wrapped in a thin cord that trails into the bathtub.

“I’ve got a question,” Eridan says, slowly.

“Shoot.”

“At what age does your caste usually start goin’ senile? Askin’ for a frien—” Eridan deftly dodges an empty bottle of shampoo. “Your aim ain’t what it used to be.”

“Yeah, weird, I wonder why that is. Maybe if we put our heads together we can figure it out with the two eyes we have between the both of us.” 

“…Point taken.” An older, familiar guilt tugs at the new, exciting guilt from yelling at Feferi earlier. Sollux doesn’t seem particularly perturbed by the reminder, though, turning back to his strange, meticulous work. After a pause, he clears his throat and awkwardly continues: “Seriously, though, what’re you doing?”

He gestures broadly at the tub itself and Eridan approaches. Inside, the grub is curled against one sloped edge, partially concealed under the dappled shadow of the shower curtain. The cord around Sollux’s wrist leads to a loose loop around the grub’s midsection.

“So what, they’ve got you in on this too?”

“AA said she needed a nap and that fucking container looked cramped,” Sollux replies, still dumping salt in—presumably to try and replicate the water from the transport. It’s kind of endearing, in that weird way that Sollux Captor occasionally is.

“And the rope?”

“A couple weeks ago, Strider was telling me about these baby backpack leash things—”

“I think,” Eridan says, squinting back into the tub, “we listen to the humans too much.”

Sollux thinks about that for a moment. “Yeah, probably.”

A moment of silence hangs between them as the grub lays largely motionless at the bottom of the tub. Eridan drops to kneel beside it, and when he does, she shifts—stirs, at first, exoskeleton reflecting the low light of the absolutionblock, before she disappears like she did the first time Feferi laid eyes on her. This time, it was made a little more anticlimactic by the still-attached rope, which still follows her at the end of Sollux’s wrist.

“So you’ve just been lookin’ after her, then?”

“Yeah, apparently I’m the most recent player in a charming little game of hot potato. Do you want your turn in having a quirky yet meaningful interaction with our mysterious and as of yet unnamed child?”

“Well, she just fuckin’ disappeared, so I don’t think she’s real warm to me.”

“Seriously, already? Wow, if you weren’t so busy killing lusii and orphaning kiddos left and right, you could have had a real future in childcare back on Alternia.”

“You’re an ass.”

As he says that, though, he sees a little sliver of pink against the stark white of the tub—a shimmer of light, again, and the grub slowly fades back into visibility, just about eight inches from where she’d originally disappeared. Eridan frowns. “I still don’t fuckin’ think this is a good idea.”

Sollux shrugs, a little helplessly. “We knew we were signing up to help raise a grub.”

“Not a tyrian.”

“Yeah, well. She’s here, so there’s not much to do about that. Are you going to help or not?”

Eridan works his jaw. After a slow inhale and a still-slower exhale, he dips a hand into the cool water of the bathtub. The grub, surprisingly, doesn’t disappear immediately, regarding the intrusion with what Eridan can only assume is instinctive suspicion. It takes him a couple more moments to realize it’s the glint off his rings that she’s looking at, and he wiggles his fingers, the refracting light dancing in the water. She doesn’t move, but the tilt of her head follows the patterns they cast.

“I’m going to take your silence as an affirmation that the emergency spelunking team has arrived and they’ve harrowingly begun to extract you from your own anal cavity.” 

Eridan ignores him. The grub makes slow progress towards the patch of light furthest from his hand, stomping a tiny foot on it like she might pin it there. He moves his finger, and the light slips away—the grub follows.

“Many brave men and women may lose their lives today,” Sollux continues. The fact that his unseeing gaze is passively fixed against the bathroom wall adds a layer of gravitas to the speech Eridan can feel him winding up to. “But I hope they find eternal rest in the arms of our lady the Handmaid knowing that their sacrifice was not in vain. This search-and-rescue mission will test the courage of—”

“Deeps below, would you fuckin’ shut up?”

Sollux plops his elbows against his knees. “It’s my turn: what are you doing? Paint me a word picture.”

“Somethin’ quirky yet meaningful, I think.”


	5. Chapter 5

The castle has been quiet for a while. Suspiciously (suspfishiously?) (no that was dumb) so, in Feferi Peixes’ opinion.

Like her girlfriend ordered, she took a break from hovering over the grub—well, something like a break. It was a good chance to catch up on paperwork, if nothing else. Nobody’s yet figured out if Feferi’s “reading goggles” are actually prescription or not, and she’s fully intent on leaving that a mystery. After a while, though, she does get restless, periodically checking her palmtop for signs of life from her quads. Nothing. 

Either something had gone really right or really wrong, and as much as she loves her gill and buoys, they know how to create a million shades of trouble to rival the number and variety of hues on the hemospectrum. She finishes firing off an eel-mail to the Human Kingdom about her upcoming meeting with Jane (unofficially known as the traumatized heiresses of CrockerCorp support group) before she sets off to find Aradia—surely she still has the grub, right?

Before Aradia had left her study, she had mentioned going to Jade’s lab, so Feferi heads there immediately. Sure enough, she finds her girlfriend reading under the shade of the absolutely massive kukui Jade had cultivated in the middle of her workspace. 

“Where’s the grub?”

Aradia looks up from her book—Feferi can’t quite make out the title in what appears to be an archaic dialect of maroon. “Oh, Sollux took her.”

“Seariously?”

“Mhm!”

“Sollux Captor took initiative over the care of another living fin and didn’t immediately collapse into a puddle of stress?”

“Apparently!”

“Oh, ship, wow. Proud of that guy.” 

Aradia closes her book with a little snap, and stretches as she rejoins Feferi. “I think he and the grub should be back in the respiteblocks. Have you heard from Eridan?”

“Naut yet, he’s probubbly off being an asshole still.”

Aradia laughs and doesn’t argue, and they head to scope out the scene in their shared living quarters.

…They are, however, surprised to see the main door to the suite slightly ajar.

Feferi brings a finger to her lips and cocks a fin, listening through the crack. 

“I’m just sayin’ with the poor field a vision caused by her lack a neck mobility clearly she’s vulnerable to aerial attack.”

…????

Feferi peers in. In the middle of the common room, Sollux is laying on his stomach on the ground with his ankles crossed in the air, facing Eridan—who’s crosslegged—with the grub between them, on dry ground. Aradia, a little shorter than her girlfriend, looks over her shoulder and bites back a snort. 

“Yeah, that’s kind of what the exoskeleton and the camouflage are for, dude.” 

“I just fuckin’ explained to you why the camouflage won’t work if she can’t tell you’re there, dude. Look—” Eridan reaches over from above and gently rolls the grub onto her side. Instead of freaking out, though, not only does the grub not disappear, she makes a noise that almost sounds like a giggle. Eridan stares.

“Ok, fine, so tell Rose and Kanaya to add a neck mobility patch in the next update.”

“…What?” Eridan’s clearly not paying attention, just staring at this tiny grub like he can’t possibly fathom what he just heard with his own two audial sponges.

“Aw, you made her laugh!” Feferi and Aradia finally squeeze past the doorway. 

“I, uh.” Eridan blinks. “I… guess?”

Aradia bends over to ruffle a big ol’ handful of Eridan’s hair, and Feferi drops down to sprawl out beside Sollux. Sollux grins from the floor, propping himself up on both elbows. “And in Whoville they say, Eridan’s small collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system grew three sizes that day.”

Sollux reflexively throws a hand up to grab the shoe Eridan tosses at him (it’s surprisingly hard to get the drop on someone you shared a sprite with).


	6. Chapter 6

Sure, they might all technically have separate respiteblocks, but more often than not all four trolls inevitably find themselves piled into one bed; the venue of choice that night happens to be Aradia’s. Without Alternia’s chucklevoodoos they’re slowly adapting to the absence of sopor, though they still have patches on standby for rough nights. It’s a funny little conglomeration of trolls of wildly varying temperatures, from Aradia’s toasty maroon to Feferi’s deep sea tyrian—tonight, they’re sandwiched in the middle, with Eridan and Sollux bookmarking either side of the bed. The grub is occupying a large saline kiddie pool about three feet away. 

“You know,” Aradia says, rolling up to lean against the backboard, her heels pressed together in front of her, “I think she definitely has my nose.”

“And here I was under the impression that she looked like an abyssal invertebrate,” says Sollux, the eternal charmer.

“Well, kind of. But an abyssal invertebrate with my nose, for sure.” 

Sollux rolls over to reach up and give her nose a fond little pinch, and Aradia handles the face mauling like a champion. “You know? You may be right.” He offers her a cheek kiss as compensation.

“She dolphinately has Sollux’s horns,” chimes in Feferi, with her arm around Aradia’s shoulder.

“What?” That was Eridan. “She only has two of ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, if he only had two. Then they’d look pretty similar. They’ve got that curve, sort of.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Me neither.” …Annnnd Feferi leans over to offer Sollux a little thwack on the back of the head for that one. “Okay, okay, not funny, I get it—”

“Fine, but she’s got your shark teeth, Eridan!”

“Fef, you an’ I both have sharp fangs, it’s kinda a whole thin’.” 

“Ocray, you guys are just buzzkrills.” 

“Forget the teeth, am I seriously the only one who noticed that this kid doesn’t have a name?” Sollux asks, adding his arm around Aradia’s shoulders, and giving Feferi’s shoulder a little squeeze.

“Well, she didn’t exactly have a lusus to give her one,” Feferi says.

“That’s us, ain’t it?” 

Feferi blinks at Eridan in thinly veiled surprise, and Aradia grins. “He isn’t wrong!”

Eridan offers a little smile of his own. It’s a rare sight—he still does it almost like his face is surrendering to it rather than doing it on purpose—but getting incrementally less rare as time puts distance between them and the game. “Yeah, Fef, c’mon. I know you’ve probably put some thought into it.”

Feferi thinks for a moment, leaning in to rest a head on his shoulder. “Allera?”

“Allera Peixes?” He asks, by way of confirmation. 

“Sounds good to me,” Aradia says, and Sollux throws in a noise of confirmation. 

“—Oh, um, okay—yeah, okay. Allera Peixes.” Feferi glances sideways down at the kiddie pool, the grub asleep inside. 

“Who fuckin’ knows,” Eridan adds, settling in deeper against the pillows. “Maybe all end up with descendants. Wouldn’t that be a riot?”

Feferi just nods—because this isn’t Alternia. It’s something so much goddamn better.


End file.
